Recently,
when I had a problem with my Windows computer, I asked a friend for help. My
friend asked me to email her a screen shot showing the problem—I had no idea
how to do it. I found the PrtScn key on my keyboard, and that sort of did the
job, but I ended up with a huge image of the entire screen. I just wanted to
capture the window causing trouble. Is there a better tool?
Yes, PrtScn has worked, sort of,
since the beginning of recorded time (well, you know what we mean). It’s a
tricky key to find unless you know where to look, and it does capture the
entire screen to the Windows Clipboard. You can then paste the image into an
email or a document. Pressing the Windows Key+PrtScn takes a screen shot of the
entire screen, and saves it into the Screenshots folder within your Pictures
folder. We also found (by doing some research) that you can press Alt+PrtScn
and Windows captures only the current window to the Windows Clipboard.
If you want a little more control
over your screen captures, try running the free Windows utility called Snipping
Tool (it’s been in Windows since at least Windows XP). You can use Snipping
Tool to capture the full screen, a single window, or a portion of the screen
(even a non-rectangular area). It’s free, it’s easy, and for the most part, for
capturing portions of the screen and saving them, it works fine.
If you want to invest a little
money, you can’t do better with Snagit, from TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com). This tool does
it all. SnagIt, available for both Windows and Mac, makes it easy to capture
anything off the screen (even windows that are too large to fit on the screen,
like long Web pages). SnagIt also provides editing tools so that you can mark
up your screen captures. We both use this excellent tool for creating screen
captures, and it’s worth the cost for us. It’s currently $50, so it’s not
cheap, but if you create screen captures regularly, it’s worth every penny!
There are a ton (and we mean, a TON) of other
options for capturing screen images. We haven’t looked at them all, and we
can’t really recommend others, although I feel sure we’ll get a lot of emails
telling us about your personal favorites. That’s great, but between Windows
Snipping Tool and SnagIt, we’re happy
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